finality

BY MICHAEL LEE

for Don

The lights along the Minnesota River aregolden nails fastening shut the horizon.The bus floats home, West across the plains,over this dark thread of road,past snow covered fields reflectingthe moon’s wet light, until we can no longer tellwhat is land or water or sky and we cannot tellwhich our brother rests in now.As we cross the final bridge into Saint Pauleverything to the east darkensand the whole country closesaround the heart of the Midwest,around its churches and its silos, its pilgrims journeyingbefore death to kneel and kiss its winding fingers,to kiss its noble silence spreadingbetween the Mississippi and the Rust Beltlike a woolen and moth-torn quilt, a fresh coatof snow, a eulogy always, almost, spoken.

Death, though it is final, is also hesitant and unsure.It is the persistent silence which followsthat convinces us this boy was the one,this land too, these factories and these bargessunning themselves in the grey lightas if they might dip beneath the water and re-emergeglistening and alive; these docks and these cranes,these warehouses angling into the shadows, preservedin a death-like geometry, though tenuous, as if,if we clap and summon the lord, if we stomp ourfeet until we cannot smell what keeps the bodyhere, until the body shakes, then might these songswake him, might these factories turn and lightlike a bulb screwed in, might we be sentence like-not final, but running on foreverthrough the grammar of mourning,the grammar of laughter when laughter is all that is left,until all that is left is his skin, and his bones, and wewho buried him are only stories or ashon our grandchildren’s mantels, and his namespray painted on the Oak Park wall is painted overor chips off and washes into the dirt, and his bonestoo become earth, and the bulletin his leg is all that remains, and rests,a small black seed opening in his coffin.

Look

BY MICHAEL LEE

Driving beyond the city, beyondcattle grazing, the long evening shadowsgrazing on light until it is gone,and the city is gone, I catch a glimpseof a house just beyond the road. In its one lit window-like a floating television in the dark-a couple makes love. The man holds the womanfrom behind by the hips, and she sinksinto him, open, as though askinghim to become her entirely,but the man looks past her, through the window,his gaze a kind of shadow wanderingthrough dusk into the hills, then beyond themas if she is only a telescope to him,as if, when he is inside her, he can seea different life, one which contains neither of them.I don’t believe I have ever seen a man so desperateto leave, to enter a woman entirely so as to simplypass through her and become, perhaps, a thoughtshe once had as a girl, become the morningbreeze or her bedroom curtains shifting quietlylike an Ivory Gull descending. His eyes scanthe horizon-the last of the sun a simple red sliverof light, a dim lamp shining from beneath the crackof a great door-and it is this gaze I carry with me.Not the gaze of my mother or fatheras they closed my bedroom door as a boyand watched the dark fold over my face-and then, one day, never looked at me this way again-nor the gaze of the woman I lovedthe many times we parted at airports and train stationsuntil eventually we parted and she did not look back,not that of my grandmother, only bones and a hospital gown,as she said my name and then turned towards the wallforever. Not the abandoned calf before it was takeninto the woods and shot, not my childhood dogbefore we drove her quietly to a quieter death.Eventually, everything that can look, willlook upon us for the last time,and our memory, which is a kind of faith,will be unable to carry even itself.Only the gaze of this nameless manwill remain, floating in a box of light, the planetwatching him stare out into the dark living room of the earth.

american jericho

BY MICHAEL LEE

I walked around the hospital six timesand still the bricks did not fall, and stillno one came to ask if I would like to come in.Though I prayed, and though I walkedaround the hospital six times more and stillthe doors did not open, and the bricksdid not fall, and my grandfatherprobably laid those brickssixty years ago, and still I cannot enter. Once,I walked six times around his buried bonesin reverse and he was not reassembledout of the earth, not returned to meor my blood circling always inside me, musicthrough the trumpets outside Jericho,and the darkness blown outof them, as if to shout me too downto rubble. I walked around the hospitaltwelve times and still the bricks did not fall,and only dust gathered in my throat, and stillno one came to ask if I would like to come in,though I looked each shift change in the eye,though it was below freezing, even as the sunbegan to rustle out of the concrete.If we are each a city of sin thenthis pulse rattling inside me is just a clockcounting down. A single note blown foreveruntil it isn’t, that is. Until the river dries.There is a bible verse in which the peoplecircle a city until it falls to the ground.There is a bible verse in which the bloodcircles inside the body until the body fallsdead in the street. I know, I wrote it.It is comprised of my dead friends,and all their memory. Let me read to you nowfrom the Book of Stephen. The Book of Jay,the Book of Don, of Susan, of Big Bob and Sean,let me read to you in the pitch of bricks being laidby my dead grandfather and his dead handsas he builds a hospital his grandson cannot affordto enter. I will tell you the story of each grain of dustwashed from his back until his own body was washed outalong with the water into the earth. Twenty-eight years,and each day I’m this close to opening the kingdom of dirt,and this day I’m walking around the hospital at two am-because I think I am dying and want to bedead-then three, then four am. How American,all this fear. This trembling ground.

Michael Lee is a Norwegian-American writer and author of the chapbook "Secondly. Finally", which won the 2014 David Blair Memorial Prize (Organic Weapon Arts). Having received grants and scholarships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the LOFT Literary Center. His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Hayden's Ferry Review, Indiana Review, Poetry Northwest, and Copper Nickel among other journals. Michael has worked as a dishwasher, a farm hand, and traveling performer as well as a youth counselor and arts programming director for youth experiencing homelessness in Minneapolis. He is a recent alum of the Harvard Graduate School of Education.